Express Employment Professionals (“Express Pros“) describes itself as a leading staffing agency in the U.S., “specializing in matching job seekers with the best jobs for their skills and experience.” Express Pros is the flagship brand for Express Services and conducts business across the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Express Pros operates as a franchise. Express Employment International supports Express Employment Professionals franchises and related brands.
According to a recent disclosure, Express Services, Inc. experienced a data breach when an unauthorized party gained access to two company email accounts between May 7 and June 20, 2024. The breach was discovered on June 21, 2024, and notification letters were sent to affected individuals on September 13, 2024.
The notification template submitted to the Montana Attorney General’s Office did not reveal what types of personal information were involved in the breach, but in reporting the incident to the Texas Attorney General’s Office, the firm checked the categories for Names, Social Security numbers, Driver’s license numbers, Financial information (e.g. account number, credit or debit card number), Medical information, and Health insurance information. They also reported that 5,941 Texas residents were affected by the incident.
The total number affected by the incident has not been made publicly available, and as of publication, no threat actor group has claimed any responsibility for the attack.
But wait — there’s more?
On October 21, unaware of the September breach disclosure, a researcher known to DataBreaches as “JayeLTee” found that Express** was leaking about 2 million people’s passwords, resumes, and other personal information in two unsecured databases. The databases appeared to be connected to expresspersonnel[.]com and franchises.expresspersonnel[.]com. According to the ExpressPros website, the firm was originally called Express Personnel Services in 1985 but changed names in 2008.
JayeLTee emailed Express on November 18 to alert them to the misconfigured data storage. The company promptly locked down the data, but they did not respond to him at all, despite a follow-up email on his part to inquire about their notification intentions.
A fuller description of JayeLTee’s findings can be found on his substack. The amount of personal information provided by those seeking jobs provides a potential treasure trove for fraudsters, including email addresses and plaintext passwords that might be reused by users across other platforms and services. As JayeLTee reports, just one of the tables with employement histories contained almost 4 million records with data related to the applicant’s previous employment, such as how much they were paid, how long they worked there, why they left, and contacts to their previous employers, as well as supervisor names. There were more than 1.5 million individuals’ data in that table. Another table, users, had more than 2 million unique logins.
Of note, JayeLTee could not be sure when these databases were first exposed. Could they have been exposed before the attack that reportedly began in May 2024? We do not know. In researching these incidents, we also found that there were a number of stolen login credentials for Express that showed up in infostealer logs. Whether any of them were employee email accounts that might have contributed to the May 2024 incident is unknown to us.
DataBreaches reached out to Express Pro’s media contact via email on November 29 to ask specific questions:
- What is Express doing in response to the exposed personal information that the researcher found?
- Does Express have access logs that go back to 2017 that show how many unauthorized IP addresses accessed the data and/or downloaded it?
- Will Express be notifying individuals whose personal information was exposed and accessed without authorization?
- What will Express be doing to prevent future data security incidents of this kind?
No reply was received.
A second email request was sent this morning, this one with a cc: to William Stoller, who is the Vice Chairman/CEO/President/Founder at Express Employment Professionals. Neither he nor the media contact responded.
** Neither JayeLTee nor DataBreaches is sure who owns or is responsible for the exposed data and whether Express Pros manages the databases or a third-party manages the data storage for them. DataBreaches specifically asked Express Pros’ media contact who is responsible for the data storage involved but received no reply.